Hannah Arendt

This summer, the imminent publication of the diaries alleged to be Adolf Eichmann's prompted New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum to attack Hannah Arendt—36 years after the fact—for having invented what he describes as "the fashionable but vacuous cliché about 'the banality of evil.'" Echoing Norman Podhoretz, whose Ex-Friends accuses Arendt of somehow being too intellectual, Rosenbaum suggests that precisely because Arendt was a brilliant philosopher, she was all wrong when it came to actual historical events. Although Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism had posited an "absolute" or "radical" evil which couldn't be explained by base motives like greed or lust for power, when faced with the evidence of the Nazi death camps, Arendt found the banality-of-evil concept "more intellectual, more interesting" than the conscious, willful kind of evil with which Eichmann was charged. According to Rosenbaum, Arendt's wooly-headed intellectualism made her guilty of denying the full criminality of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, which is nothing less than a "(pseudo-)intellectual version of Holocaust denial."

Them's fightin' words! But I'm not sure why, not yet. I just don't like Rosenbaum, for one thing. He's one of these anti-intellectual intellectuals who wants it both ways. He wants everyone to think of him as some kind of brilliant thinker, but he also always insists on the accuracy of common-sense interpretations of things. First he admits that Arendt is brilliant, but then he accuses her of being a pseudo-intellectual because her theories don't support what he already thinks. Ugh.

Because some of us had already discussed reading Arendt's The Human Condition together, and discussing it via e-mail, I thought it would be a good idea to combine that discussion with a beta-test of Hermenaut's new conference system. My brother Peter is building it, and although we will be making some changes, it's ready to be put through its paces. So let's read The Human Condition together, and discuss it here. Maybe by the end of this discussion I will know why I disagree with Rosenbaum...

I suggest that we begin by agreeing on a schedule. We should discuss each chapter, in order, by a pre-set date, and then move on to the next chapter. How about we discuss chapter one from Thursday, October 21 until Thursday, November 4? That will give us all a week to read the first chapter, if we haven't done so already. Ready to begin?

—Josh